Travel Narratives from New Mexico: Reconstructing Identity and T ...

Wilderness space depends, in part, on “the tendency to assume that this area was devoid of human inhabitants” (Greenfield 7). Caffey explains that the “frontier experience” for Westerners was often an erasure of native peoples: “Indians and Spanish-speaking residents of the Rio Grande were not considered to be people, but rather were viewed as obstacles to westward expansion, much like the dry desert, extremes of climate, and the imposing barrier of the Rocky Mountains” (55). With human history and conflict out of the way, the Westerner could explore his sense of self in relation to an imagined world or cosmos. Nicholas Gill points out in The Ambiguities of Wilderness that wilderness “is as much a social construct as a natural event” (qtd. in Bell and Lyall 7).

Wilderness does have intrinsic meaning in itself, but the meaning of wilderness also depends on the cultural context in which it is produced. For the mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century Westerner, wilderness was an empty space devoid of meaning until the Westerner imposed meaning onto it. Westerners often saw wilderness as an existential theater in which the Western traveler could play out his heroic acts of exploration and conflict with a hostile environment. The Westerner might perform acts in the wilderness that he could not perform in modern industrial society because, in the wilderness, he was alone with God and the natural elements. In purposely losing himself, he could find other aspects of himself not available in day-to-day experience. Alone in the New Mexico desert, the Westerner might see himself as a lone hero on a heroic quest for knowledge and identity. Whereas society in the mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century American east and Europe often reined one in with its confining cultural spaces, the “isolation and the vastness of New Mexico's frontier guaranteed in themselves some measure of individual freedom for colonial citizens” (Simmons 104). Imagining that New Mexico lacked the cultural constraints of the “civilized” West, the Euro-American and European could be whoever he imagined himself to be in New Mexico. A common imaginative construct of the Western self in New Mexico was that of the questing hero. In order to be heroic, the Westerner had to imagine New Mexico as a foil to be endured or conquered. Before New Mexico was “won” by Euro-Americans